brycewang-stanford HLR Workflow Router (hlr-workflow)
The orchestrator for a Harvard Law Review submission. HLR is student-edited, not peer-reviewed, and generalist across all of law. The router's first job is to set the right mental model: you write a near-final article, run a preemption check before drafting, submit broadly across peer journals via Scholastica (but to HLR through its own submission system, not Scholastica), leverage offers with expedite requests, and then survive an intensive student-editor edit plus a full cite-check / source-pull. Figure out the stage, then dispatch.
When to trigger
- Starting a new HLR piece and unsure where to begin
- Mid-project and unsure which skill applies next
- Deciding the piece type (Article, Essay, Book Review, or a Supreme Court Foreword/Comment by invitation)
- Holding an offer and deciding whether/how to expedite (route to
hlr-placement-strategy) - An editor sent edits or a source-pull request (route to
hlr-student-editor-review)
First question: which piece type?
| Situation | Type | Route to |
|---|---|---|
| Full original legal argument, novel normative claim | Article (long, heavily footnoted) | normal pipeline below |
| Shorter, focused intervention or provocation | Essay | normal pipeline, tighter scope |
| Engaging a recent book to make an independent claim | Book Review | hlr-thesis-and-contribution + hlr-argument-structure |
| Invited Supreme Court Foreword / Comment / Term piece | Supreme Court issue | hlr-argument-structure + hlr-sources-and-bluebook (invitation-driven) |
Notes are student-written and unsigned by HLR editors — not an outside-author track. If you are not an HLR editor, you are writing an Article, Essay, or Book Review.
Routing map (stage → skill)
Is the topic timely and placeable? → hlr-topic-selection
What is the legal claim / payoff? → hlr-thesis-and-contribution
Has this argument been made already? → hlr-preemption-check
How is the argument built? → hlr-argument-structure
Are authorities cited correctly? → hlr-sources-and-bluebook
Is the footnote apparatus sound? → hlr-footnotes-and-cite-check
Does the prose read like a law review?→ hlr-writing-style
Where and when do I submit/expedite? → hlr-placement-strategy
Ready to upload (HLR's own system)? → hlr-submission
Editor sent edits / source-pull? → hlr-student-editor-review
Working through the edit cycle? → hlr-revision-and-editing
Default order
topic-selection → thesis-and-contribution → preemption-check → argument-structure → sources-and-bluebook → footnotes-and-cite-check → writing-style → placement-strategy → submission → student-editor-review → revision-and-editing
Run the preemption check early — discovering your claim was already made after drafting is the classic wasted-summer failure. Iterate thesis ↔ argument ↔ sources before polishing prose.
Law-review reality check (force this before routing)
| Check | Pass condition | Route if weak |
|---|---|---|
| Student-edited model | You expect a generalist student audience, not a subfield peer panel | hlr-writing-style |
| Preemption | You have searched SSRN / Westlaw / HeinOnline and your claim is genuinely new | hlr-preemption-check |
| Normative payoff | The piece does more than describe doctrine — it argues for something | hlr-thesis-and-contribution |
| Source-pull readiness | Every proposition is pin-cited and pullable to a real source | hlr-footnotes-and-cite-check |
| Placement plan | You know the seasons and the expedite mechanics before you submit | hlr-placement-strategy |
Anti-patterns
- Treating HLR like a peer-reviewed journal — it is student-edited; pitch and process differ
- Skipping the preemption check and discovering the claim was published last year
- Submitting outside the seasons, or single-submitting when the norm is multi-submit + expedite
- A descriptive doctrinal survey with no normative thesis (generalist editors reject "no payoff")
- Loose, un-pinpointed citations that cannot survive the source-pull
Output format
【Stage】topic / thesis / preemption / argument / sources / footnotes / writing / placement / submit / edit / revise
【Type】Article / Essay / Book Review / Supreme Court (invited)
【Route to】hlr-<skill>
【Why】one line
【Then】the next skill after that
Supplementary resources
../../resources/external_tools.md— legal research databases + Bluebook/citation tooling../../resources/official-source-map.md— official HLR URLs behind every fact in this pack